


A Year In Motion: Moving Toward March

by Miss_Mil



Series: A Year In Motion [3]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 21:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5680999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Mil/pseuds/Miss_Mil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were no magical fireworks as they finally defeated the Goa’uld, and there was no amazing moment where they fell into each other’s arms only to profess their love like the end of some sappy clichéd romantic movie.</p>
<p>Maybe that’s what kept them both going over the years, that elusive promise of one day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Year In Motion: Moving Toward March

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all, 
> 
> Apologies for the delay in posting the next part of A Year in Motion. My dear laptop died, and with it went some of my latest works. Incredibly poor timing over Christmas, but now I am back up and running with generation 3 of my dear laptop! 
> 
> Enjoy.

The air is warmer now with the beginning of March, the flowers of spring beginning to bloom as the last of winter melts away. Sam fidgets in her seat. For an Air Force officer who had spent the better half of her career flying, she is unusually nervous on this flight. Civil service planes aside, it is just ten minutes until they touch down at Washington airport, and she is nervous as hell. 

Later, she'll tell herself that the impromptu flight to the nation’s capital was done in the interest of her new position at Groom Lake, a pressing need to have a face-to-face meeting with her superiors. But deep down she knows she is doing it as a step toward their new found freedom in terms of their relationship.

If you can even call it a relationship. 

She isn't sure what they are, but she knows they aren't sticking to the rules of junior and senior officers anymore. They haven't talked about it properly, and she is hanging in the promise laced through his words as they parted company at his cabin in January. 

Soon enough, she finds herself standing outside the arrivals area, a small bag in hand as she wonders not for the first time what she is really doing here. 

She takes a deep breath as she steps into the cab.

o-O-o

Jack sighs and rubs his hand over his face. He is just about to yell for his secretary when she pokes her head around the door.

'General?' 

He narrows his eyes. 'You know, my last chief sergeant has this uncanny ability to appear whenever I needed him. You seem to have inherited this annoying, but somewhat useful talent.'

His secretary blushes, and opens her mouth to apologise. Jack stops her with a wave of his hand.

'Just tell me, can I go yet?'

Jane smiles. 'Yes General, you can go home.'

'Thank you!' Jack lets out with a somewhat pained sound of triumph. 

Nothing is getting in his way; it's Friday, and he is getting out of here. Before Jane can stop him, he swings his briefcase up off the chair, grabs his cover and overcoat before making a quick escape through the door. The downside of being a two-star General was the sheer amount of paperwork, and he wasn't afraid to tell anyone who would listen how much he hates it. 

He weaves his way through the corridors, avoiding eye contact with anyone who looks like they might stop him. He is in the process of giving a junior officer a particularly menacing glare when he spies a flash of blonde and rather long legs whipping around a corner. 

He blinks and increases his stride, hoping to catch a better glance. 

Surely not. 

'Carter?' 

The blonde whirls around and he is caught off guard by intense blue eyes he hasn’t seen in a while. His heart thuds painfully in his chest.

God, he's missed her.

'Sir,' she smiles. 

She looks good. Too good.

'Whatcha doin'?' He tosses out casually, as if he had just breezed into her lab to interrupt an important project rather than standing in the lobby of a government building, junior officers gawking at the two of them and failing at pretending they aren't. 

'Uh, well I just had a meeting with General Vidrine about the latest...'

She launches off into an overly thorough explanation as to her presence in Washington, but he doesn't care. He isn't listening. Jack is just happy to see her. 

Carter stops talking, and looks at him intently; it catches him unaware as he stares blankly at her. She picks up on his momentary lapse of concentration. 

'I asked you how you find Washington, Sir.'

'Ah,' he replies. 'Oh you know, I love politics.' He flicks an invisible piece of lint from the sleeve of his jacket.

She flashes him a grin. 

'Heading out?' He asks, flicking his briefcase toward the elevators in the corner. 

'Yes Sir,' Carter nods, taking a step toward the exit and he follows suit. 

They fall into idle chit chat as they pick their way through the last of the building, a few junior officers scrambling around trying to get things sorted for their bosses. It's been a long time since Jack has really talked to her. His last attempt at trying to delve a little deeper into Carter's world resulted in the not-so-shocking revelation that Pete had proposed. 

If he is really honest with himself, he wasn't surprised. Any guy would have to be stupid not to marry Carter. Two men had asked that he knew of, and he’s sure a dozen others would have thought about it at one stage. 

His reaction to the news was what he wasn't proud of. Her straightforward, honest question was met with a very cryptic and cold answer, and it took all of his will power to ignore the burning sincerity and hope in her eyes. But surely she understood that he couldn't very well say 'please don't marry that schmuck' in the middle of her lab inside a military base. 

But maybe he should have.

Regardless, here they are two years later, and things seem to be going well. The friendship they had lost in the year Daniel ascended was starting to show itself again. 

Jack has this nagging feeling that if he tries too hard to hold onto this feeling, the fragile fragments of their new found friendship might just crumble away. 

'You hungry?' He suddenly blurts, surprising himself. 

He notices the way she twists her hands in response. She’s just as unsure as he is. 'Uh, sure.' 

'Great, I'm starving!' Jack says with his usual enthusiasm. 

Sam grins, and strides easily beside him. Thank god the woman can walk in heels. 

Despite the spring feeling, the air was still quite cool for March and Jack suddenly finds himself wishing for more than just his light overcoat. Carter must be freezing. A few months and she'd already adjusted to the Nevada heat. 

A quick glance toward her confirms his suspicions; her lips are slowly getting a blue tinge. 

'Carter, I know we've done the freezing-to-death thing a few times, so let's say we stop here,' he jokes, waving his hand at a restaurant on the corner. 

Her facial expression shows she doesn't find the joke nearly as funny as he intends. 

'Sure, Sir.' 

He is about to tell her to lose the sir, but thinks better of it. 

The restaurant is casual, nothing too fancy and suits them both down to a tee. It’s awkward at first, but soon they settle into the rhythm of talking once their food has been ordered. It’s reminding Jack a lot of their relationship early on in the program, when the flirting was deemed innocent enough and the not-so-accidental touches were allowed; each thinking the other didn’t feel the same way. 

He admits to himself that this is the first time he has really looked at her. The concerned glances in his cabin didn’t count, being far too concerned with her emotional side to notice the physical. 

She looks almost content with the way things are. The stress lines around her eyes are no longer there. Maybe Nevada suits her. 

‘Are you happy at Nevada?’ 

He asks her the same question that he voiced only five weeks ago, in a similar setting in the commissary of Groom Lake. 

Her eyes move up to his, the question in them unguarded. 

‘I guess I’m still figuring out if that’s where I need to be.’ 

Her answer almost mirrors her previous one. Jack can see through it though. 

She misses SG-1. If he’s honest with himself, he does too. 

Jack plays with his beer glass, swirling the froth at the bottom. 

‘I miss the team,’ Carter whispers as she flicks the bottom of her wine glass, the contents still mostly untouched. He isn’t even sure why she ordered wine. 

‘You could go back?’ he offers. 

Carter shrugs, folding her hands in her lap as she looks at him. ‘It’s not the same.’ 

He knows the feeling; they are all craving what they once had. Really, nothing had been the same after Daniel. The happy team attitude they had in their fourth year had gone and never returned. The threats built up and became too much over the years. And the two military officers built a wall between them that refused to come down. 

Somehow though, there were little cracks there now. With each day the lines grew bigger, stretching out as little holes formed, parts of the wall crumbling away. 

‘Carter, we can’t ever go back to what we had,’ he states with a sigh, registering how it sounds as soon as it leaves his mouth. ‘I mean, as a team. We’re all different now,’ he shrugs. 

Carter sighs. ‘I know. I just never thought I’d see us so far away, you know. Teal’c spends more time off-world, Daniel wants to go to Atlantis, you’re here…’  
She trails off, and he finally gets it. 

There were no magical fireworks as they finally defeated the Goa’uld, and there was no amazing moment where they fell into each other’s arms only to profess their love like the end of some sappy clichéd romantic movie.

Maybe that’s what kept them both going over the years, that elusive promise of one day. 

And yet here they are, unable to express those words even though they are finally able to. 

‘I just thought now that we aren’t at the SGC, things would be a bit different,’ Carter blurts it out a rush, her hands now tightly holding on to the knife on the table.

Jack’s heart lurches.

‘They still can be,’ he offers quietly. 

She is just about to open her mouth with a reply when the shrill ring of a cell phone ricochets around them. 

Jack grimaces. ‘O’Neill.’ 

Carter watches him intently throughout the course of his call, as though she is running through their conversation and finishing it in her head without ever saying a word. 

In the end, he has to go. Regretfully he leaves Carter, protesting as she shoves him out the door insisting she will get this bill. 

He smiles at the folded napkin in his hand, the scribbled address to her hotel leaching ink onto his palm. 

Clichés be damned. 

o-O-o

It’s far later than he would have liked when he is finally able to leave the office. It’s very early Saturday morning, and clearly national emergencies have no sense of timing when it comes to personal weekends away. 

Jack is standing outside the hotel, gazing up at the windows as the bell boy watches him sceptically. 

He isn’t sure if he should go inside. The written words on the napkin burning a hole through his pocked tell him otherwise. 

But it’s late. Early. Whatever. 

Carter should still be awake. 

He scoots his way pass the bellboy with an air of grace. Three knocks and one minute; that’s how long he’ll give her to answer the door.

She answers after only half a minute.

Her hair is ruffled, the ends slightly damp and curling from the shower she’s had earlier. The T-shirt she wears is well faded and far too large. 

It occurs to Jack in that moment that he has never seen her quite so unguarded. But then again, he never really had them both in a situation where she could be. 

‘Carter,’ he clears his throat roughly. 

She eyes him carefully, blue eyes watching with the intelligence he’d come to love. 

‘Uh,’ he really isn’t sure what to say. In fact, he isn’t really sure what he is doing here in the first place. 

‘Want to come in?’ 

She saves him the trouble of explaining his presence. He enters the room cautiously, and hangs his cover by the door. 

‘You save the world again?’ Her voice is light as she toys with him. 

‘Of course,’ he answers seriously. ‘Do we ever do anything else?’

She smiles at him before padding back across the room and curling up on the bed. 

‘I’m watching this movie,’ she offers. 

He is standing stiffly by the door, his uniform a stark reminder in the dim room of what they are. 

Two Air Force Officers together in a hotel room teetering on the edge of a line they really shouldn’t cross. 

But then again maybe they wouldn’t cross that line tonight. 

Jack wanders over to the bed, strips of his jacket and shoes and climbs up next to her. 

‘What’s it about?’ he asks. 

Carter sighs. ‘Some stupid romantic movie with a ridiculously clichéd movie.’

Jack grins. ‘But they are the ones you just can’t help but watch, right?’ 

Carter shrugs. ‘Of course.’ There is a wicked tone to her voice. 

The movie rolls on after the commercials, and for a while he sits there quietly, not really watching the movie but not really thinking about anything either. 

He has this incredibly feeling of content. 

Jack ends up falling asleep not long after, tucked up next to Carter on a stupidly small hotel bed. 

Saturday morning dawns bright and clear, and Carter is on the first flight back to Nevada. She slips out quietly before he is really awake, whispering a goodbye that weaves its way into his dreams. 

The Monday morning back at work, he flicks her a brief email that says more than what he could when she was there. 

He teases her about migrating back to the warmer weather as DC has an unusual cold snap over the following days. 

A reply email comes swifter than expected. He smiles, and suddenly his day seems brighter. 

In the end, they didn’t cross that line. Maybe they will some day. But it’s March. 

Their year is just beginning. 

Fin.


End file.
